Category Archives: Article Marketing

Two years ago, many content marketers were hailing Facebook's Instant Articles (IA) as a potential game-changer in social marketing. The idea that brands could publish natively on Facebook using long-form content that loads quickly on mobile presented some interesting opportunities for social engagement and brand awareness. Along with other trends at the time (like Twitter potentially dropping its character limit and the debut of Snapchat Discover), in-depth content looked like the future of social content marketing.

Now, however, it looks like IA may not be the game-changer Facebook hoped it would be, as the network struggles to make it worthwhile for publishers.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's goals is to make Facebook's News Feed a "perfect personalized newspaper" for every user. To do this, the News Feed algorithm attempts to show users the updates, birthdays, events and shared stories that it thinks would be most important to them. It follows that news sites have been very successful under this system.

In fact, with so many news sites getting more and more referral traffic from Facebook, the network's influence has never been more powerful. But what will happen when they finally decide to directly host content instead of having publishers post a link? We're about to find out.

Last week, an article titled "The White Paper Is Not Dead" appeared in the Huffington Post. It was an interview with John Fox, founder of Venture Marketing, and it defended the use of white papers as an effective marketing technique. Indeed, somanyarticles have asked "are white papers dead" that it could seem like their usefulness has ended.

However, most of these articles conclude that white papers can be useful for generating leads and getting conversions when done right. But they fail to answer one glaring question: if your white paper is a long piece of content in PDF format, why not just call it an ebook?

It's that time again. Google's Penguin 3.0 update has officially rolled out after about a year of silence, and the reactions so far have been mixed. Webmasters and SEOs will likely be doing one of three things as the update takes effect: enjoying a surge in rankings due to a clean link profile, seeing no change in traffic, or scrambling to fix low-quality links.

Fixing spammy links involves either contacting the webmasters that are linking to you or using Google's disavow tool. Unfortunately, despite much discussion, Google has failed to make it clear when people should actually disavow links.

It's a question that's been asked thousands of times in many different ways: will robots eventually perform every human task? While it's looking more and more like the answer could be "yes," many would argue that technology could never replicate human creativity. For example, artificial intelligence could never paint the Mona Lisa or write Moby Dick.

Not so fast, though. Article writing software is likely being used by someone right as you read this, and the text it's creating is indistinguishable from a human's.